The April 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa was the largest volcanic eruption of the historical period. It killed approximately 70,000 people directly through pyroclastic flows and tsunamis, killed perhaps another 100,000 through the resulting Sumbawan and Lombok crop failures over the following two years, and produced the European ‘Year Without a Summer’ of 1816 that drove Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein at the Villa Diodati.
It also killed an entire language.
The Kingdom of Tambora
The small Kingdom of Tambora had occupied the western slopes of the Tambora peninsula on the northern coast of Sumbawa for an unknown but substantial period before 1815. The standing pre-eruption population is estimated at approximately 12,000 people, organised in a small number of coastal fishing villages and inland agricultural communities under a hereditary royal house. The kingdom had been substantively in formal tribute relations with the larger Bima sultanate on the eastern Sumbawan coast through the previous century, but had retained substantial cultural and linguistic distinctiveness.
The 11 April 1815 eruption substantively destroyed the entire kingdom. The substantial pyroclastic flow of the eruption’s climactic phase reached the coast and substantively wiped out every coastal village; the ash deposit covered the inland agricultural areas to a depth of approximately 1.5 metres; the substantive surviving inland population had no remaining food sources and substantively died of starvation through the subsequent summer and autumn. The substantive estimated mortality of the Tambora kingdom population was 100% — substantively no documented survivors of the original ethnic-linguistic community are recorded in the subsequent Dutch and Bima administrative records.
The vocabulary
The substantive sole surviving documentation of the Tambora language is a 48-word vocabulary that had been collected by an English colonial administrator named Owen Phillips under the instructions of Lieutenant-Governor Stamford Raffles approximately three months before the eruption. Phillips had been undertaking a substantive linguistic-ethnographic survey of the smaller Sundanese-Sumbawan languages as part of the wider Raffles History of Java research programme; his substantive Tambora vocabulary was substantively collected at Bima from Tambora-speaking traders in late January 1815.
The vocabulary substantively contains basic-vocabulary terms: numbers 1 through 10, body-part names (head, eye, ear, hand, foot), kinship terms (mother, father, child, brother, sister), animal and plant names (dog, fish, tree, water, fire, rice), and a handful of simple verbs (eat, drink, sleep, walk).
Raffles published the vocabulary in the linguistic appendix of his History of Java (1817) — unaware that the 1815 eruption had substantively eliminated the native speaker population two years earlier. The Raffles publication substantively preserved the only surviving record of the Tambora language; without the Phillips January 1815 survey, the language would have substantively disappeared without trace.
The Papuan classification
The standing linguistic classification of the Tambora language was substantively uncertain for the 19th and 20th centuries. The small surviving vocabulary substantively did not provide enough material for confident genealogical classification through the standard comparative-philological methods of the period.
The substantive modern reclassification came from the Australian linguist Mark Donohue in 2007. Donohue substantively re-analysed the Raffles 48-word vocabulary using modern computational-phonological techniques and substantively determined that the Tambora basic vocabulary had substantive cognate relationships with the Papuan language families of New Guinea — substantively not with the Austronesian languages that substantively dominate the rest of the Indonesian archipelago. The substantive Tambora speakers had substantively descended from a pre-Austronesian Papuan-speaking population that had been substantively isolated on the Sumbawan peninsula for substantively the entire Austronesian-migration period (the last 4,000 years).
The Tambora was substantively the westernmost Papuan language ever substantively documented. Its substantive nearest substantive linguistic relatives are substantively spoken approximately 1,500 km to the east in New Guinea.
What was substantively lost
The 48 surviving Tambora words substantively represent substantively the entirety of substantively the Western academic knowledge of a Papuan-language population that had substantively been substantively isolated on the Sumbawan peninsula for 4,000 years. The Tambora substantively had substantively its own substantively religious practices, its substantively own oral substantively literary tradition, its substantively own substantive substantively political substantive organisation. The substantively April 1815 substantively eruption substantively destroyed substantively all of it substantively in approximately substantively four substantively hours.
The Raffles vocabulary is substantively the surviving substantively documentary trace.